Those Who Follow
by Elivira
Summary: Jim Kirk had spent his whole life running and in the end it was all Leonard McCoy could do to keep up. Gen, Companion piece to Those Who Run


**Title:** Those Who Follow

**Summary:** Jim Kirk had spent his whole life running and in the end it was all Leonard McCoy could do to keep up. Gen, Companion piece to Those Who Run

**Warnings:** Normal Tarsus warnings (genocide etc.), slight mentions of child abuse and some bad language. If those things are going to bug you, don't read. Please don't flame!

**DisclaimerThatIForgotLastTime:** I don't own Star Trek and never will. This is a work of fanfiction, I make no money from this and it is written purely for entertainment purposes. All people places and things belong to their proper owners. The only thing I own is the order of the words.

**Author's Note: **_Yay! It's Bones! He is by far my favorite character and I just love the relationship between him and Jim. I wanted to write from something with Bones and I was inspired by Those Who Run and thus this fic was born. You dont have to read that one for this but some things might make a little more sense. It also helps that since I'm currently in Japan on a student exchange program I can't understand any of my classes and since I'm not getting credit for most of them I have lots of time to write._

_Again I would like to thank my friends Brandon and Livvy for being wonderful beta readers!_

* * *

**Those Who Follow**

_I started running away when I was five years old. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized what I really wanted was somebody to come after me. - Willie Aames_

With his hands elbow deep in James T. Kirk's abdomen, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy swore. The abdominal trauma caused by Jim's latest excursion gone wrong was extensive. It often worried him that the young Starfleet captain had little to no self preservation.

Couldn't he have at least waited until they were on the Enterprise before he started bleeding out?

"Damn it, Ensign! Cauterize that bleeder!" His shell shocked assistant fumbled with the cautery, almost dropping it, before completing the order.

McCoy fought the urge to rub his temples in hopes to ward off a fast approaching migraine and swore again as the monitor in the medical shuttle beeped erratically at Jim's lowering blood pressure.

"Suction!"

Damn it! Why the hell did Jim always get him into these types of situations? Right. That was a stupid question; because he was James Fucking Kirk! He should know better by now. The blueeyed man onthe operating table in front of him had an uncanny ability to get neck deep into trouble and still keep mouthing off his captors. It could be twenty to one and Jim would still go down fighting. Really it was no wonder he got impaled on a shit covered stick. Leonard had long ago learned that where Jim Kirk was involved it was always best to prepare for the worst.

Pulling out the last shard of wood he ordered the incompetent ensign to start sanitizing the wound. The last thing Jim needed was an infection, the damn kid was allergic to most of the commonly used antibiotics. Leonard had no doubt that with Jim anything that could go wrong would go wrong. The kid had the worst luck out of anyone he had ever met. Sometimes he wondered what Jim had done to piss off the universe so much, but then again Jim also had an uncanny abilityto piss off whomever he came in contact with.

He snatched a tricorder from the ensign, who swooned at the sight of the blood on his hands, already looking green from having to look at his captain's insides. McCoy wondered how the boy had ever graduated the Academy. Sanitizing the area he proceeded to stitch up the torn, but now clean, flesh with quick practiced stitches before waving the dermal regenerator over the wound and connecting incision.

"Ensign, comm the Enterprise, Jim and I are ready to be beamed aboard and have a nurse prepare a bed in the medbay." He barely registered the ensign's "Yes, sir!" before turning back to his friend.

"Damn it Jim, I guess it would be too much to ask that you don't do that again?" He slipped of his bloody gloves off and pushed down his mask. Leonard checked the anesthesia level one last time and for once he was glad when he felt the familiar tingle of the transporter surround him.

When he landed on the transporter pad on the Enterprise he immediately straightened to check the now slightly pink scar on Jim's abdomen and to make sure that he was still breathing with both lungs, one had been punctured by a splintered rib the week before and was still not at one hundred percent. The scar would fade in a week or two and as long as Jim took it easy he could be cleared for duty in a quarter that. McCoy snorted. Who was he kidding? Jim would be back to work the next day cleared or not.

He straightened as a nurse appeared with a bio-bed and helped to gently place Jim into it. He set up a portable IV and made sure that it was working properly before ordering the nurse to put the captain into a private room and prepared himself to report to the bridge. Spock had ordered an update from him as soon as the captain was fixed.

* * *

Leonard McCoy knew that James T. Kirk was an expert at running from his past. He also knew that his past was something well worth running from, you'd have to be insane not too, and as he looked down at the young captain he knew he would follow the kid to hell if Jim only asked.

Staring at the monitor beside the bio-bed that his friend resided him, he refused to think of how close he had been to losing him. "The stats are stable." He kept telling himself. "He's fine."

Laying there in the bed Jim looked nothing like the bright eyed man the Leonard was used to seeing. In just the way he held himself Jim usually looked confident and competent. But here lying buried in a pile of white sheets he looked too young and all McCoy wanted to do was wrap him in bubble wrap and never let him leave. Knowing Jim though, he would find a way to get into trouble even in the medbay, arguably the safest place in the ship. Jim's ability to find trouble was awe inspiring and made Leonard want to pull his hair out. He would swear to anyone who asked, though why anyone would was a mystery to him, that before he met Jim he had never found a gray hair.

"Bones?" Jim's voice, weak and hoarse from misuse, pulled him from his thoughts.

McCoy looked down as Jim opened his eyes and tried to remove the oxygen mask attached to his face. He was expecting it and pushed the blonde haired man's hand away, taking the time to straighten the mask before speaking.

"Leave it Kid. You need it, your lung was injured again and you had a hole in your abdominal region, right through your kidney." He didn't mention the high probably of a pulmonary infection, Jim wouldn't remember this anyways.

"That's Bones's talk for stomach." Jim stated, his pupils were uneven and his concussion was made evident by the fact that he felt the need to talk to the wall. He reached up to mess with the oxygen mask again and McCoy swatted his hand away.

"Physical violence against a superior officer, Bones, I could have you court martialed." Jim supplied without infliction and his dry lips cracked as they worked their way into a smile that looked more like a grimace.

"Go back to sleep Jim, I'll wake you in an hour."

"Yeah, yeah Bones I know the drill." Leonard was surprised at the lack of argument; it showed how tired he was. The fact that Jim drifted to sleep before McCoy could formulate a reply only cemented his deduction.

He sighed and pulled a chair to the edge of the bed. At least Jim was sleeping. Jim had a bad habit of forgetting to sleep and often went days without resting. There was really nothing anyone could do about it. Sedating the young man was effective but not efficient, let alone the long term effects it could have on the kid. Then again, not sleeping also had adverse effects on the body. In the and it was just choosing the lesser of two evils.

Jim had nightmares, McCoy knew that, Jim sometimes woke up screaming when they had shared a dorm at the academy. Leonard had tried every medicine he could think of to try to help. Jim was allergic to half of them and the rest just plain didn't work. What he would give for a full list of Jim's allergies.

McCoy had grown up in the south, Georgia, and though he often wished he was back home with his daughter. He didn't think that he had ever wanted to see her as much as he did now. Even if it did mean that he had to see his horrid ex wife. He knew that even though Jim would never admit it, he was grateful that Leonard dragged him home whenever they were earthside. To Joanna, Jim was the cool uncle who was still such a kid at heart that he would gladly play with her.

McCoy was pretty sure that with Joanna's sparkling eyes and Jim's innocent smile his daughter and best friend could get away with murder.

Jim spent time with his daughter partly to assure that she got the childhood that he had never had a chance to have. His childhood has ended the first time Winona Kirk had left him with her brother, Jim's uncle Frank.

Leonard didn't know the whole story, only the bits and pieces he had picked up over the years, but he did know that Frank had been an abusive alcoholic and the death of her husband combined with postpartum depression had caused Jim's mother to leave him and spend most of his childhood in deep space looking for George Kirk's killer. It was slightly ironic that Winona retired from Starfleet four years before the Narada incident. Even though stories of the boy who had saved the federation and avenged his father were in every paper for weeks following and Jim's face had been plastered on the from page, Winona Kirk never made an attempt to establish contact. Jim had been captain of a starship for four hours and saved the life of everyone on earth.

Leonard knew small slivers of Jim's childhood mostly because the owner of the bar Jim frequented would call him whenever Jim was too intoxicated to leave. Apparently he and Jim were pretty famous during their academy days. The son of the late hero, George Kirk, and the grumpy southern doctor. Both of them joined Starfleet when therapy were drunk, McCoy thought that throwing up on Jim's feet in the shuttle ride to Los Angeles was one of the smartest things he had ever done. It was one of events that lead to a great friendship.

Jim was a talkative drunk. Alcohol made him more confident, not that he wasn't already, and it took a lot of whiskey to talk about Tarsus IV. Sometimes McCoy just wanted to forget everything he had learned that night. He had heard of the Tarsus IV famine and following massacre, hell it had made national news, but the rest. And to learn that Jim had been there... Sure he knew there was something in the kids past; his medical records were missing big chunks, but to learn the gory details. It made him want to vomit.

Tarsus IV had to have been one of the largest cover-ups in Federation history. When Jim had woken up the next day and exclaimed "Thank god I still have my clothes on!" and he knew his friend would be okay, but when he opened his mouth to ask, the look of pure pain in Jim's eyes had caused him to close it with a snap.

He had burst into Captain Christopher Pike's office, yeah not one of his brightest moments, the next day and had barely escaped getting expelled from the resulting shouting match. When Jim bailed him out of jail the next day, with a look that said how extremely grateful he was Leonard knew that it was worth it. Given the chance, he would do it again and he knew that the kid would do the same for him. There was no doubt about it.

The Federation, with the help of the media had painted Kodos as a crazed murderer and nothing else. They neglected to mention that he had been a Starfleet appointed official and while he did order the execution of four thousand innocents, he also hung some of the corpses around the colony as a message to the remaining townspeople, the rest he burned in the middle of the town. He tortured women and children alike and Starfleet and kept the nine survivors, Jim included, out of the public eye until the evidence of the brutality had healed. The names and faces of the nine were classified information. They had all been children; at thirteen Jim was one of the oldest.

It really was amazing that Jim was still loyal to the federation, Jim's morals were straight and though he wasn't afraid to kill, he always tried to find a way in which everyone lived.

With all that happened, how Jim had ever passed the psych evaluation that was required to join Starfleet, let alone the one to become a captain, was a question that Leonard thought he might be better off not knowing the answer to. He was bound by the Hippocratic Oath after all.

As the ship's CMO as well as the captain's personal physician McCoy was usually one of the first people on board to be alerted if someone was in need of medical attention, but when it came to the captain all bets we're off. Like a hose afraid of water Jim did everything he could to stay away from the medbay. From walking around with fractured ribs, "They're fractured Bones? I didn't even notice!", to refusing treatment for meningitis, "Stop fussing Bones, it's just a cold!", Jim avoided the medbay like the plague. Leonard often had to resort to treating him as he moved, "Stop moving damn it!" or blackmailing him to come to the medbay, "I'll tell the crew about the time you slept with an admiral's daughter!"

Jim was his best friend, captain, and most of all someone he trusted explicitly. There was nothing he wouldn't do for the kid, hell he'd even break his oath, and he was positive the reverse was the same. Jim's past was worth running from and it was all McCoy could do to keep up.

* * *

Author's Note: _Yay I'm done! So about the surgery scene... I think that though the medical advancements in the future may be great in TOS McCoy has made comments about how he doesn't always trust technology, and though he thinks the medicine of our current day medieval (Star Trek: The Voyage Home) something can't be fixed endoscopically and I don't think that will change too much in the future. Them being in deep space wouldn't help either._

_Concussions suck I got one from falling off my horse and was saying all sorts of strange things. For a mild one like what Jim had, all that really happens (at least with my experience) is you have to be woken up every hour (or a 1/2 hour… I can't remember. XD). Like I said, it sucks._

_I apologize for any incorrect medical terms, the extent of my medical knowledge comes from helping the vet neuter goats, watching Grey's Anatomy as well as the little bit of research I did._

_I am planning to write more fics in this verse all kinda interconnecting. I'm also planning a JimXFem!Bones Academy Era fic, but I haven't started it yet so it's still a long ways off. It'll be a multichapter. I also have a good idea for a crossover with the Avengers, Tony sentric, but that one is even farther off._

_Thanks so much for reading! I love you all! Please comment!_

**ADDED 2014.5.16: **This fic is now 2.0 of a series of fics (mostly oneshots though). So far the series consists of two posted; _Those Who Run_ (1.0) and _Those Who Follow (2.0)_. I am currently writing two more oneshots called _Put Me Back Together (1.4 Will explain the injured lung that Bones mentioned)_ and _Those Innocent Years (?.0)_ (titles subject to change).


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